Our monthly round-up of noteworthy articles published on CFO.com, a source of news and insight for senior finance executives

February's globetrotting cover story for CFO magazine investigates how companies around the world are coping with the prolonged slide in the value of the dollar. It soon becomes clear that foul weather for some is fertile for others.

For businesses based in America with significant sales abroad, the weak dollar has been a boon, as several finance chiefs interviewed boast. Bosses in Europe and Asia are less pleased with the greenback's plunge, and many—such irony—are considering relocating operations to increasingly low-cost America.

Such a strategy is described as the “ultimate hedge”, as the dollar's decline pushes currency risk up the corporate agenda. This flight from financial to operational hedging on the dollar's relative decline is not only forcing many businesses to become truly global—it also indicates that many chief financial officers, in their reading of macroeconomic tea leaves, believe that the greenback's sickly condition is a long-term one.

Every company, it seems, is doing something to tackle climate change. But measuring a firm's carbon footprint is an inexact science at the best of times. This article argues that it is about to get even harder, thanks to the confusing array of standards, protocols and methodologies competing for favour.

As a result, new members climbing aboard the “carbon neutral” bandwagon are finding it difficult to measure their greenhouse gas emissions, both in terms of agreeing an accepted standard and in terms of accuracy. “You can drive a bus through many of the numbers that are reported,” says one consultant.

Still, there is agreement on some fronts, notably in “a growing consensus that emissions from any single company reveal only part of the story.” Shareholders are increasingly seeking emissions data from across a company's supply chain, including the CO2 produced by raw material inputs.

The article offers practical advice, by comparing the various methods of measuring supply-chain emissions. For those looking to smarten up corporate climate-change disclosures, a list of recommendations is also provided.

An essential read for anyone worried about potential recession, this web-only article asks a wide range of experts to predict the impact of an economic slowdown on the job prospects for a variety of finance functions: tax, internal audit, treasury, controlling, finance in general and, yes, for the CFO.

Though post-Enron reforms led to an explosion in demand for employees with accounting and finance skills, the subsequent complexity, and cost, of compliance may now put these jobs at risk. American officials, for example, are loudly promising to battle the intricacies of financial reporting, possibly rolling back the most onerous aspects of laws like the Sarbanes-Oxley act.

The average cost of the finance function has risen by 12% over the past three years, the author notes. “With a recession looming and the initial pain of Sarbanes-Oxley largely over, CFOs will be under pressure to resume the steady downward trend that characterised pre-Enron finance costs.”

Controllers are the likeliest candidates for the chop; tax specialists, internal auditors and treasurers can probably breathe easy. For CFOs, executive tenure these days is so fragile that recession is almost irrelevant; they should always watch their backs.

The tests facing companies from emerging economies with global growth ambitions are the subject of February's cover story for CFO Europe. A recent report by the Boston Consulting Group identified 100 such “global challengers” that are set to spring from their fast-growing home bases to “strengthen and multiply”.

This claim is tested by speaking to executives on the inside of these companies—Lenovo in China, Satyam Computer Services in India and Naspers in South Africa. Andy Miller, CFO for European operations at Lenovo, describes how the Chinese firm turned around the PC business it bought from IBM by bringing in new ideas. At Satyam, Srinivas Vadlamani speaks about the firm's move into higher value-added services and consulting as it pushes deeper into America and Europe.

Steve Pacak at Naspers offers a note of caution. The Cape Town-based media company made several forays into Europe in the 1990s, but has largely pulled out and redirected investments back to emerging markets like Russia, Brazil and China. Developed markets mean developed competitors, and he warns gung-ho “global challengers” not to overestimate their abilities when “fighting a gorilla on his own turf”.

Inter-generational conflict is timeless; still, the gap today between old-school senior managers and the latest crop of bright young things—the so-called “millennials”, with their well-developed sense of entitlement—seems particularly wide.

For many executives, the perceived lack of loyalty of these “mercurial, selfish” millennials is especially irksome. Their demand for constant praise lends them “an attitude normally associated with velvet-rope-jumping celebrities.” Yet some millennials query why companies deserve unwavering devotion when they are so quick to sack employees to meet short-term targets. “You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel,” says one.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in-between (and is subject to swings of the economic cycle). Useful advice on how uneasy inter-generational working relationships can be improved is offered: forward-thinking firms tend to retain and motivate younger staff.

In the end, some senior executives admit that millennial attitudes bring benefits, including less rigid hierarchies and skilled, well-rounded employees. But the younger interviewees seem to lack similar generosity. A telling point perhaps?

When employees go the extra mile, does the bottom line benefit? The answer would seem to be obvious—after all, most companies covet an “engaged” workforce, with employees willing to do that little bit extra for the good of the firm. But to date, measuring and managing engagement has been a difficult art. Now, however, “experts are coming up with hard data that proves a link between employee engagement and financial performance.”

Despite the statistical ambiguity, Denis Duverne, the CFO of Axa, a French insurance group, is convinced there is a direct link between engagement and the bottom line. “In financial services, you don't have any patents, you don't have anything other than the quality and engagement of your workforce to make you succeed,” he says. “It's the most fundamental driver of financial performance.”

Mr Duverne outlines Axa's efforts to boost employee engagement, from regular surveys to formal career development programmes to financial incentives. Just as well: according to Towers Perrin, a consultancy, about eight out of ten employees lack engagement with their jobs (see article). This failing can cost a business up to half of its potential income.

The image of a harrowing taxi ride through the Chinese countryside is apt to describe the findings of a survey carried out by CFO China—more than half of respondents believed that growth wasn't under control at their companies. The authors use these findings to launch into a discussion of managing the breakneck pace of business in the Middle Kingdom.

Top of the list of concerns is that the development of internal controls is not keeping up with growth, resulting in lax investment analysis and large risk exposures. One company profiled, Hunan Xiangquan Group, went bust last year after it abandoned its roots in the spirits industry and chased growth in businesses ranging from animal feed to luxury hotels.

The companies examined are certainly trying to bolster controls and formalise investment analysis without sacrificing growth, but they remain in the minority. “Many more are barrelling ahead, growing fast but ill-prepared to steer around the obstacles that appear in their headlights.”

“Extraordinary Circumstances” is the title of a new book by Cynthia Cooper, the former internal auditor of WorldCom; an appropriate handle, as this interview with the so-called “mother of 404” (after the section of the Sarbanes-Oxley act passed after she blew the whistle) shows.

Ms Cooper describes how her feelings changed “from curiosity to discomfort to suspicion” as she uncovered massive accounting fraud at the American telecommunications company, and recounts battles fought with then-CEO Bernie Ebbers and then-CFO Scott Sullivan, both now serving long jail terms for their roles in the scandal. “History has a way of repeating itself,” she says, “and based on human nature there will always be fraud.”

Most of all, Ms Cooper is worried that internal audit functions at many companies remain riddled with the same conflicts of interest that allowed WorldCom to cook the books for so long. With the strife at Société Générale, a French bank, in the background, the lessons of her experiences for executives are as pertinent today as ever.